This relates generally to the collection of information from motor vehicles.
A number of services collect information from motor vehicles such as the time between oil changes, whether any mechanical failures are detected, tire air pressure and the like. Examples of such services are General Motors OnStar®, Nissan Car Wings®, and Ford Sync® services. These services collect information at run time from a wireless phone or Internet connected vehicles and make that information available for analysis.
The U.S. Department of Transportation's Intellidrive proposal for networked communications among vehicle sharing is based on sharing vehicle mined data using X.509 credentials and large numbers of certificates of authority.
There are a wide range of reasons why vehicle harvested data may be important. Global positioning system, speedometer, and odometer sensor data may be collected from vehicles and used for things like usage based taxation, speed limit enforcement, location based services and advertisements, real time traffic flow analysis, private investigation services, safety and family communication.